Today we’ve entered Edubuzz.org for the BECTA ICT Excellence Awards Support for Schools category.
This category aims to reward those organisations who support school improvement with ICT, encouraging the systematic and innovative use of appropriate technologies to deliver learning and teaching, communicate with the wider school community and improve administrative efficiency.
Luckily it’s accepted that not every project will hit all the targets, so our inability to make any claims for improving admin efficiency shouldn’t be too much of a disadvantage. Last year’s winners were announced in November, so we may have a while to wait before we know how things have gone…
Yesterday blog number 1000 was created for a P7 student at the small rural Innerwick Primary School.
It was part of a set of 7 for the P7 members of Lindy Lynn’s composite P4/5/6/7 class, reflecting the increasing use of blogs to provide web publishing tools to individual students. The blogs will be used by the P7s for a project to reflect on their time at Innerwick, and the group are full of ideas!
Staff are also talking about the possibility offered to get some collaborative work going with other feeder primaries in the Dunbar Grammar School cluster, with the aim of helping the children to get to know some other students who’ll be joining them at the much larger secondary after the summer.
In another sign of the times, due to staff pressures, the P7 group were trained in a 3-hour session yesterday morning, without their class teacher, in how to use the blogs, and - not surprisingly - picked it up very quickly. They’ll now be training their teacher, and supporting one another, to get started in the classroom.
Total visits to edubuzz.org for March 08 - including everything from authors posting to search engines crawling - were up
over 100% on Mar 07. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to that!
The edubuzz blog system has now moved home, and the service is back. Basic tests have been successful, but if you notice anything wrong, please get in touch or leave a comment.
The changeover meant taking the system down from last thing yesterday until earlier today. Apologies if that caused you any inconvenience.
The new place has much more storage capacity, and more memory. The move was necessary for two reasons. First, performance: the server was becoming overloaded during morning and afternoon peak periods. That was down to lack of memory. Secondly, free storage capacity for uploaded files was becoming low. Continue reading ‘Edubuzz blogs move home’
Things are getting a bit crowded in the edubuzz house, so it’s time to move to a bigger place.
Currently we’ve around 1000 blogs, 1500 user accounts and up to about 10,000 visitors a day. WordPress Multi-User has a healthy appetite for memory, and we’re finding out the hard way what happens when it can’t get enough.
This weekend the blog system will be moving to a larger capacity server. The plan is to make the changeover late Friday evening, so there will be a bit of downtime then. If all goes well, it should be back in service on Saturday.
During the school Easter break, Edubuzz blogs have been upgraded to a new version of WordPress Multi-User, so there are a few new features to explore.
What’s changed? Main changes you’ll notice are:
- An new Advanced Editor toolbar button lets you easily use colour text, format headings, insert custom characters (e.g. £, √, ≠) and undo changes.
- The upload area now displays the size of uploaded files, making this key information easily available for the first time.
- You can now add tags to posts, and a tag cloud to your sidebar. This provides the foundation for site-wide tagging, tools for which will appear in later versions.
- The amount of upload space you’re using is displayed, so you can see when you’re getting near the limit. We can now also manage available space on a blog-by-blog basis. so individual blogs can be provided with more storage space.
Could an edubuzz blog potentially be a place where all East Lothian Parent Councils - and Parent Forum members - get involved with what’s happening across the county?
Some time ago we set up the “Parents” blog (http://edubuzz.org/blogs/parents) to support consultation on the draft Parental Involvement strategy (20 pages, pdf, 800KB).
Now that the Parent Councils are up and running, meetings are now taking place of the East Lothian Association of Parent Councils. That raised issues of communications between the individual councils.
- How do Parent Councils keep in touch with what other councils are doing?
- Where can you find links to East Lothian Parent Council web sites?
- Where can you find updates on what’s happening county-wide, such as the Association meetings?
Our current plan is to use the Parents blog as a place to share this information, and hopefully promote the integration of all parents into East Lothian’s leading networked education community. If you’d like to contribute to the site, please get in touch and we’ll help get you started.
Over at SupportForAll, the blog about support for learners in East Lothian, you can read about how a Polish parent is helping in the classroom at Musselburgh’s Burgh Primary.
She doesn’t have much English herself, but is able to read Polish from bilingual books to a pupil who doesn’t speak English.
We purchased bilingual story books and the mum read the Polish version and I was able to echo in English. When she heard the story in Polish, my P1 pupil was really excited and the rest of the class were fascinated. Now that they are a regular event the other children also enjoy these sessions and are beginning to predict what I am going to say based on what has been read and they are able to pick out some Polish words if they are repeated a lot within the story.
120 school PCs, and over 20 from East Lothian offices, were connected today at 11.30am. And about 100 from elsewhere. Not many people know that.
Over at Windygoul Primary, Emma Griffiths has today posted a short film of small group work in the nursery, focusing on listening skills, building literacy, and co-operative group behaviour using “The Tiger Who Came To Tea”.
It’s another good example of how the combination of classroom video cameras, combined with web publishing, now enables useful sharing of classroom practice at very low cost.
Another recent example was by Mhairi Stratton of East Lothian’s Maths Recovery team, who published a short video showing how real-world problems can be used to help children develop their own strategies for problem solving.
Here’s an outline of what’s involved in publishing these videos:
- Connect the video camera and start iMovie or Windows Movie Maker.
- Import the original digital video file.
- Export the video in a suitable format, e.g. a low resolution Quicktime movie.
- Upload the video file to Google video, and copy the URL of the video’s web page.
- In your WordPress post, click the yellow “A” toolbar button (for Anarchy Media Player) and paste the URL in where requested.
- Publish your post - done!
